Working to keep your digital experiences secure

HOME> When Do I Need to Apply This Update – Adding Priority Ratings to Adobe Security Bulletins

When Do I Need to Apply This Update – Adding Priority Ratings to Adobe Security Bulletins

How urgently do I need to apply this update? That’s the most common question we get from customers in managed environments when we release a security bulletin. Our current severity ratings do a good job of objectively describing the worst-case scenario involved with a security issue, but they do not necessarily tell a customer all they need to know about the risk and priority of a particular security update. All critical security updates are not created equal. For example, if a Flash Player issue is being exploited in the wild, the update to resolve the vulnerability deserves a much higher priority than, say, a patch for a critical vulnerability in Photoshop. After all, Flash Player is a browser-based plugin with hundreds of millions of customers. Photoshop, on the other hand, has a much smaller customer base and would require significant social engineering to successfully exploit the product. So we started to wonder, how can we communicate the priority of our security updates more effectively?

We want to be as simple and direct as possible about the real-world risk associated with the vulnerabilities addressed in any given security update, and we decided that adopting a separate priority ranking scheme was the best way to accomplish this. Here is the priority scheme we are planning to use to rank security updates in the future:

Priority 1

Priority 2

Priority 3

This update resolves vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild for a given product version and platform. Adobe recommends administrators install the update as soon as possible. (for instance, within 72 hours).

This update resolves vulnerabilities in a product that has historically been at elevated risk. There are currently no known exploits. Based on previous experience, we do not anticipate exploits are imminent. As a best practice, Adobe recommends administrators install the update soon (for instance, within 30 days).

This update resolves vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers. Adobe recommends administrators install the update at their discretion.

We’re going to base our priority ranking on historical attack patterns for the relevant product, the type of vulnerability, the platform(s) affected, and any potential mitigations that may be in place. This is a new system, so we may find that adjustments will need to be made. We also believe that continuing to use the current severity ratings makes sense, since this information has been helpful to many customers, so you can expect to see both ratings being used in future security bulletins.

We look forward to your feedback. Our goal is to help our customers in managed environments prioritize updates, so we’ll see if this new priority ranking scheme works to accomplish that! As we have been emphasizing a lot recently, the majority of attacks we are seeing are exploiting software installations that are not up-to-date with the latest security updates, so as always we recommend that users keep their software installations updated with the latest version of Adobe software.